Rex Murphy: Have we wasted the last 10 years in Afghanistan?

It used to be that the only purpose of war was victory. On Afghanistan, even after a decade of involvement there, that clarity is still not present. A mission that began in the fevered days after Osama bin Laden’s attack on New York and Washington, and which sought in those early days the defeat of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and the rout of the Taliban, also quickly took on a secondary burden: that of rebuilding or helping to rebuild the Afghan state, of introducing some elements of Western-style democracy into the country, and of assisting as well in the building of its most basic infrastructure.

And if one goes back to the first few years of our involvement in Afghanistan, one will find that highlighting the humanitarian side of the mission — that we were helping to build schools to educate young Afghans, and young Afghan girls in particular — was very much the practice of our politicians and even our military.

And so, very commendably, it should have been. The ferocity of the Taliban’s hatred of education for females, its “forcing” of ignorance on women, is perhaps of all its despicable practices the most despicable.

Also, nothing more justly put paid to the sometimes frenzied opposition to the Afghanistan mission by self-designated “anti-war” groups — that this mission was “imperialist” or “colonialist,” or was designed to secure that legendary and elusive “Afghan pipeline” and all the rest of their dim litany — than the quietly heroic effort by our military and aid agencies to build schools and roads and wells; in essence to assist in the building of a better life for Afghans. That effort was utterly genuine. Canadian soldiers took immense pride in this aspect of why they were in Afghanistan

Our military presence was often described, with truth, as necessary to the support of this other and noble cause. Yes we were there to defeat al-Qaeda and rout the “scumbags,” as General Rick Hiller famously spoke of the Taliban. But the argument was made that over the long term, helping to fashion the institutions of peace would be the best guarantor against any real resurgence of the Taliban and its primitive ideology.

Ten years on then, where are we? Certainly, our military can look over that decade with pride. They have performed miracles of valour and industry. On the home front, and largely because of their performance in Afghanistan, perhaps no group in our society enjoys more good will or a higher standing.

On a larger scale, however, the Canadian military drawdown in Afghanistan has to be unsettling and unsatisfactory. We are — and the United States is as well — leaving or proposing to leave when Afghanistan is not militarily secure; nor does it have those civil and democratic institutions that we have been insisting on as a precondition for progress. All the good that has been done there could be undone once we’re gone. Just this week, in fact, an attack by eight suicide bombers on the Intercontinental hotel (a target thought to be secure) in the capital of Kabul tells us how far from resolved the conflict is.

The mode of withdrawal aggravates the dilemma. Planned and announced withdrawals are a signal to the opposing forces to stay in the fight. We are leaving not because the war is over — the fate of Afghanistan is still inconclusive — but because after 10 long years, lives lost, and soldiers wounded, Canadian support for this mission has declined.

In parallel, the humanitarian dimension of this mission is left contingent and unfinished. Both Canada and the United States, as they reduce their combat role, insist that they will keep troops in the country, that the humanitarian mission will continue. But these assurances are, I fear, pieties on the eve of departure.

It may be unpalatable to admit it, but we are starting to end our presence in Afghanistan with neither victory, the only real end of wars even in our enlightened day, nor the fulfillment of those broader and noble pledges toward rebuilding that sad country we made early on.

National Post

Rex Murphy offers commentary weekly on CBC TV’s The National, and is host of CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup.

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